Our last article, The Entrepreneurial Life, mentioned the idea of jobs being a recent invention (recent relative to history, not last week’s news.

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives some insight into the roots of the word, job.

1557, in phrase jobbe of worke "piece of work" (contrasted with continuous labor), perhaps a variant of gobbe, "mass, lump" (c.1400, see gob). Sense of "work done for pay" first recorded 1660. Slang meaning "specimen, thing, person" is from 1927. The verb is attested from 1670. On the job "hard at work" is from 1882. Jobber "one who does odd jobs" is from 1706. Job lot is from obsolete sense of "cartload, lump," which may also be from gob.

Notice that the historical use of the word seemed to center on doing pieces of work which probably varied considerably. This is a contrast to the modern notion of a job as a narrowly defined set of tasks that one did in a specialized and continuous manner.

William Bridges, author of JobShift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs, explains:

The job is a social artifact, although it is so deeply embedded in our consciousness that most of us have forgotten its artificiality or the fact that most societies since the beginning of time have done just fine without jobs. The job concept emerged early in the nineteenth century to package the work that needed doing in the growing factories and bureaucracies of the industrializing nations. Before people had jobs, they worked just as hard but on shifting clusters of tasks, in a variety of locations, on a schedule set by the sun, the weather, and the needs of the day. The modern job was a startling new idea – to many people, an unpleasant and even socially dangerous one. Its critics claimed that it was an unnatural and even inhumane way to work. They predicted that most people wouldn’t be able to live with its demands. Americans even once talked about the job as “wage slavery” and contrasted it with the farmer’s and craftsperson’s freedom and security. But what started as controversy became the ultimate orthodoxy: we’re hooked on jobs.

Now the world of work is changing again. The very conditions that created jobs two hundred years ago are disappearing.

Now the world of work is changing again. The very conditions (mass production and the large organization) that created jobs two hundred years ago are disappearing. Technology enables us to automate the production line, where all those jobholders used to do their repetitive tasks. Instead of long production runs where the same thing has to be done again and again, we are increasingly customizing production. Big firms (where most of the good jobs used to be) are “unbundling” their various activities and farming them out to little firms, who have created or taken over profitable niches. This “outsourcing” of work is not just happening in the support areas where it started – running the cafeteria, for instance, or providing building-maintenance services. Three out of ten large American industrial firms now outsource at least half their manufacturing. Public services are privatizing and government bureaucracies (the ultimate bastions of job security) are thinning. As the conditions that created jobs fade, we lose the need to package work into jobs. No wonder they’re disappearing.

We all will have to learn new ways to work.

Bridges wrote this in 1994. The past 13 years have only accelerated the changes he saw emerging. Jobs are not secure. Sure, there will still be jobs around, but your future security will depend on being a lifetime learner and constantly growing in your ability to create and deliver value to the marketplace. I recommend Bridges’ book for its outstanding advice on how to live in a dejobbed world.

Links

• JobShift by William Bridges (Amazon.com)